There are many types of marketing tactics that can increase traffic to your website, but here at Saker Digital, we have seen time and time again that equipping your website with a good foundation is key to garnering consistent traffic and increasing conversions. Part of any solid base digital marketing plan should include search engine optimization (SEO).
While many marketing firms claim to assist with SEO, they may place other tactics first instead of building the foundation you need for success. So, what does an SEO firm do?
An SEO firm, like Saker Digital, specifically works with website owners looking to focus their marketing efforts on gaining traffic by earning traffic via unpaid search engine traffic. SEO consists of looking at the big picture of your website and considering content marketing, user experience (UX), user interface (UI), public relations and outreach, and data analysis. By considering these factors, an SEO firm can determine how to best speak to your audience, how to gain high-quality backlinks, and how to ensure that your customer finds your website and stays on your website.
Although search algorithms (and subsequently SEO) are constantly changing and improving, the techniques emphasized with SEO lay a solid foundation from which you can build a website that consistently ranks on Google and receives targeted traffic.
How does Saker Digital lay a foundation for your website?
SEO firms can provide a wide variety of services to help you better understand your website and make your website more pleasurable for your audience. Since a successful website contains a multitude of moving parts, an SEO firm is committed to understanding the context, purpose, and ideal experience of the website to make it as appealing as possible to its ideal audience and to search engines like Google.
A few of the SEO services we offer
Website Audit and Competitive Analysis
Without a clear understanding of your website, your company and its positioning in the industry, even the best marketer wouldn’t be willing to predict how certain SEO tactics would improve your search ranking or traffic. In order to ensure we make the best marketing choices for your business and build the appropriate foundation, Saker Digital focuses on understanding each business’s specific problems and finding appropriate solutions — rather than applying one-size-fits-all formulas.
Preparation is key to building a successful website that returns consistent results, so an SEO firm will typically begin their work with extensive research to best understand what is working in a particular industry, how competitive your relevant keywords are, how technically sound your website is, and how you currently perform against your competitors.
Elements that are typically included in the initial SEO audit include:
Keyword Research
Easily the most recognizable aspect of SEO, keyword research is the evaluation of what keywords are most relevant to your industry and are gaining traffic from your ideal audience. Good keywords to target on your website attract your audience, produce good click-through rates, is searched for frequently and is not highly competitive.
When performing keyword research, an SEO firm determines which keywords and search query you are currently ranking for on Google (or other search engines) and what position your website is ranking in for those keywords. From here, a firm can help you determine which keywords you should be targeting instead or more heavily to attract the correct audience and increase the chances of ranking in a visible position (ideally on page one).
Saker Digital provides detailed keyword data reports to all clients and works with clients to find the best keywords to target for high engagement.
Technical Site Audit
Many server-side aspects of your website can contribute to poor rankings in search engine results. An SEO firm will inspect technical aspects of your website, like evaluating whether your website is mobile-friendly or secure for online transactions, determining your page speed, examining your site structure and internal linking, and examining indexation, among others.
Some SEO firms will perform separate Content Audits to examine the way your content is presented on the page, the types of content you’re producing, the meta tagging on each page and the content topics you can write on to better target your keywords.
At Saker Digital, we’re dedicated to ensuring that your website is compliant with Google’s current standards and that your website is easy to navigate and appealing to customers. That means we focus on both the quality of the content, the way it is structured on the site, and the entire customer experience on your site from the first click.
Link Analysis
The quantity and quality of websites linking back to your pages help Google determine how credible, authoritative, and valuable your content is. The impact of your backlinks on your Google ranking is called “link juice,” and based on the kind of link juice coming to your site, you may want to focus your efforts on higher quality websites and disavow irrelevant sites.
Saker Digital offers a comprehensive view of who is linking to your profile and can offer potential linking relationships through researching your competitor’s links. We also ensure that your link profile is clean and compliant with Google’s requirements, so your site does not risk penalization from past linking activities.
Analytics and Google Search Console Evaluation
Your website’s Google Analytics account and Google Search Console can reveal a lot of useful data to explain the success of the marketing efforts you’ve pursued in the past. An SEO firm performs a detailed evaluation to glean valuable data points from the programs linked to your website. This allows the firm to report on trends within your site, potentially align those trends with larger trends in the industry, and determine a client’s history and current status with Google.
At Saker Digital, we’re dedicated to understanding your site as thoroughly as possible, and by understanding your SEO and analytic history, we provide you with a report about the current state of your site in the eyes of Google. This lets us know the past performance of your site, can identify issues on particular pages and helps us understand if you are contending with Google penalties.
Each of these factors allows us to gain a better understanding of your website and provide the most effective recommendations on how to move forward with your SEO strategy.
How can Saker Digital optimize your website?
Following initial reporting and research, an SEO firm can create a personalized SEO strategy and gameplan to best optimize your website for performance in search engines. Here are some of the next steps that Saker Digital to improve your website.
Redesigning or re-coding your website
Your website’s current design may be hurting your ranking potential. A confusing site structure, sloppy coding, or too much CSS and Javascript can impact the customer experience and speed of the site. Particularly if your website is difficult to navigate, it may require design changes or structural edits to improve customer experience. A website with clean, simple code and clear structure creates a foundation that is easy to build off and which will improve your performance in search engines and increase conversions.
Link Management
Backlinking is central to effective ranking, but having a large amount of low-quality links can hurt you in the long run. That’s why Saker Digital is not only dedicated to helping you develop high-quality links, but we also help manage links coming in and remove or disavow links that are not relevant or valuable to your website.
Link building is an ongoing SEO activity, and Saker Digital works to actively create an influx of high-quality links for your website. This is done through manual outreach efforts; for example, an SEO firm will track where your brand is mentioned and ensure that a link is requested on that webpage. Additionally, other SEO outreach includes requesting links from those linking to your competitors (as appropriate), outreach to websites who may be interested in featuring content from your website, and assisting with your company’s PR efforts for improved placement in online media sources.
Content Marketing
Many SEO firms, like Saker Digital, assist clients with proper targeting and creating content that is relevant and valuable for their audience. Since link building becomes significantly easier when your brand is creating informative and engaging content, SEO firms are dedicated to identifying content gaps where you can create content that is likely to rank.
Answering questions in your content allows your company to become the authority in its industry while also potentially ranking for relevant long-tail keywords. An SEO firm identifies which questions are being asked most frequently, examines the content that currently exists on the topic, and helps your company determine how you can best position yourself with your content to present your authority to your prospective customer.
The more original content exists on your website, the more points of entry a potential customer has to learn about your company. Thus, Saker Digital helps you develop an effective content strategy to expand your current content offerings, more thoroughly appeal to your customer by answering their questions, decrease potential confusion and customer service calls by addressing questions on your site, and explore possibilities for collaborations which may result in high-quality links.
Analysis and Reporting
A solid optimized foundation can put you ahead of the crowd online, but in order to stay ahead of the crowd, constant experimentation and monitoring are key. Since Google’s search algorithm is changing daily, the demand to create an even better customer experience and comply with Google’s ever-changing requirements is constant. In order to stay ahead of the curve and create the best possible SEO strategy for your business, SEO firms perform daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly analysis and provide frequent reports to highlight ways to improve moving forward.
Everyone wants to know what’s working and what isn’t with their business, but many may not have the skills or understanding the monitor and track their success themselves. Firms like Saker Digital help companies make sense of the data acquired by their website and make intelligent marketing decisions based on data, not just on gut feelings.
Frequent monitoring and reporting also helps businesses confidently take their marketing to the next level or quickly diagnose a problem with their website. A credible SEO firm will help you understand what is going on with your website at all times and help you see improvement in a way that makes sense to your entire team.
Everyone understands that in order for a business to succeed, it needs to have customers. By improving your SEO, you invest in high-quality leads that come your way consistently, without worrying about daily budgets and paid advertising. Building a solid foundation for your business is crucial, and by working with an SEO firm like Saker Digital on your marketing initiatives, you can place your best foot forward in the online world.
